In biological systems, organic molecules exert a remarkable level of control over the nucleation and mineral phase of inorganic materials such as calcium carbonate and silica, and over the assembly of crystallites and other nanoscale building blocks into complex structures required for biological function.
Materials produced by biological processes are typically soft, and consist of a surprisingly simple collection of molecular building blocks (i.e., lipids, peptides, and nucleic acids) arranged in astoundingly complex architectures. Unlike the semiconductor industry, which relies on a serial lithographic processing approach for constructing the smallest features on an integrated circuit, living organisms execute their architectural “blueprints” using mostly non-covalent forces acting simultaneously upon many molecular components. Furthermore, these structures can often elegantly rearrange between two or more usable forms without changing any of the molecular constituents.
The use of “biological” materials to process the next generation of microelectronic devices provides a possible solution to resolving the limitations of traditional processing methods. The critical factors in this approach are identifying the appropriate compatibilities and combinations of biological-inorganic materials, and the synthesis of the appropriate building blocks.